1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of personal information management and more specifically, to synchronizing and publishing personal information, such as contact and address information, between multiple users and interfaces connected to a network, such as the Internet.
2. Description of the Related Art
Maintenance of up-to-date contact information between friends, family, business associates, clients, and customers has always been a challenge and a difficult task. More frequently than expected, people change at least some of their contact information, such as phone numbers, fax numbers, mobile phone numbers, electronic mail addresses, physical addresses, and the like. As one example, presently approximately 35% of Internet users change electronic mail addresses annually, approximately 33% of mobile phone numbers are changed annually, and approximately 40 million physical addresses change every year.
Out-of-date contact information leads to personal losses, such as friendships, and business losses, such as missed opportunities that could increase productivity and revenue. For example, inaccurate and low-quality customer data results in bad mailings and staff overhead costing upwards of $600 billion a year to U.S. businesses.
To help manage this large amount of contact related data a number of personal information manager (“PIM”) applications have evolved, e.g., Microsoft Outlook®, Eudora Pro®, and the like, for a variety of devices, e.g., personal computers (“PC”), personal digital assistants (“PDA”), and mobile telephones. Nevertheless, users continue to be challenged with respect to maintaining consistency or separation of information as the number of devices and interfaces on which such information resides increases.
Often, users desire to synchronize information between these devices. For example, a user may synchronize personal information to be stored on, and accessible from, a personal computer in the home environment, a personal computer in the work environment and a portable PDA. Conventional synchronization software products that help users synchronize PIMs on different devices in this manner included Intellisync® software from Puma Technology, Inc. of San Jose, Calif.
A drawback of conventional synchronization software products is a requirement of a physical connection between the PDA and the computer system hosting the PIM. Another drawback of such conventional synchronization software products is that it its use it limited to synchronization of a particular device or PIM and not with respect to other users. Yet another drawback of such conventional synchronization software products is resolution of discrepancies between data in substantially identical entries in the different devices. The user is forced to save substantially similar, though not identical, entries or the user must affirmatively select which data to overwrite before any synchronization process is completed. In turn, this decreases efficiency and flexibility for a user.
In addition to PIM information on devices, online sources to maintain PIM information have also evolved. Conventional online services such as web portals (e.g., Yahoo! by Yahoo! Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif. and Excite by Excite Inc. of Irvington, N.Y.) have incorporated address book and calendar features into their portal services for users. For example, Yahoo! Inc. provides Yahoo! Address Book, Yahoo! Calendar and Yahoo! To Do List services in which a user can store address, calendar and to do information on a remote server operated by Yahoo! Inc. These conventional web portals further offer synchronization software (e.g., TrueSync® synchronization software developed by Starfish Software, Inc. of Scotts Valley, Calif.) to synchronize copies of personal information stored online with other devices. However, these services and associated conventional synchronization software have drawbacks similar to those previously described.
To help resolve problems with conventional synchronization software of the type described, online service providers on the Internet, such as PlanetAll.com (now owned by Amazon.com), developed a conventional online service for storage and maintenance of personal information on a server, accessible via the Internet. In general, these services allowed a user to subscribe to the service and store personal information at a remote server so that the user's personal information was automatically included in the online address books of other subscribing users of that online service.
In these conventional online services, the subscribing owner of the personal information was responsible for maintenance of their information. Whenever the subscribing owner made changes to the information, the online service server was updated. Thereafter, other subscribing users of the system would have access to the updated information within their online address books. Moreover, these online services also touted the ability to synchronize information across various physical devices through the online service server. For example, these conventional online services provided the ability to synchronize personal information maintained within a PIM with the personal information stored on the online service server through a downloadable conventional synchronization software product, such as, for example, Intellisync® for PlanetAll.com, developed by Puma Technology, Inc., of San Jose, Calif.
One problem with these conventional online services is they had to be symmetric. Symmetric services require a subscription membership to the service on both sides of the information exchange facilitated by the service. That is, only subscribers of the conventional online services could update personal information with each other. Thus, the service only worked if both the user providing the updated information and the user seeking an information update subscribed to the service. Non-subscribers were unable to synchronize their personal information with subscribers and vice versa. Hence, subscribers to the service would be unable to maintain synchronized data with nonsubscribers. This symmetry requirement limited user flexibility in maintaining consistency of data across the various types of contacts.
These conventional services (including PlanetAll.com) have been used to promote the deployment over the Internet of private networks of subscribers based on the premise that a subscription to the private network provides a valuable service, i.e., a centralized address book. However, such attempts to deploy private networks have failed due principally to slow deployment rates. In part, these private networks failed to grow their membership because the symmetric nature of the private network service limited the value for the initial set of users. The real value of the service could not be realized until large numbers of information users became subscribers of the private network service. Hence, as long as the number of subscribers of the private network service remained small, new users were not enticed to subscribe. Consequently, without new subscribing users, the private network service could not grow to a size necessary to support it's value proposition. In turn, the private network service would ultimately collapse and fail and again lead to problems of having information that is no longer synchronized.
Still another problem with these conventional online services was limited subscriber flexibility in configuring the information for synchronization in a manner most suitable for that subscriber. For example, the subscribing user lacked flexibility allowing a subscriber to select particular data fields or sets of data fields to update other devices and/or subscribers in of the service on a per device and/or subscriber basis. Thus, subscribers were limited to an “all or none” proposition for updating information between devices and/or subscribers.
From the above, there is a need for a system and process to asymmetrically manage information, including (1) synchronize data at one or more layers for a user with nominal or no need for intervention by that user and (2) to merge data involving two or more entries into a single entry with nominal or no need for user intervention and without causing or writing substantially duplicated entries.